TOLEDO, Ohio — Exactly one year after Desire Hughes death, her killer, Jadiah Carter, was sentenced to life in prison without parole.
"That firearm didn't protect you. It didn't make you any safer. It turned you into a murderer. It turned you into a baby killer," Lucas County Judge Lindsay Navarre said.
Navarre told Carter that he took the life of the 7-month-old before her first words, steps and chance to celebrate her first birthday.
His sentence was handed down in the Lucas County Common Pleas court on Thursday.
"A gun was in the hands of a young man who had a road rage incident and rather than respond rationally, he decided to fire indiscriminately into a car," Assistant Prosecutor William Dailey said.
Carter's attorney, Jeffrey Crowther, argued the 23-year-old is not a troublemaker and made a mistake.
"This is not a drive-by shooter. This is not the person breaking into a house. This is not someone who went out looking for trouble that day," Crowther said.
For a family who has lost a child to gun violence like the Hughes family has, there's no winning.
"We lost a family member and unfortunately, Mr. Carter is going to be away for a long time and our heart goes out to him and his family as well," Jamie Turner, the aunt of Desire's father who was driving the car at the time she was shot, said.
Desire's family feels that justice was served, but it won't bring the baby girl back.
"The day that this happened a year ago, she was trying to climb out of my nephew's lap and standing up on the table and she was just a little go-getter already from what we could tell. She was just the sweetest baby," Turner said.
Turner said grief isn't the only thing her family has had to deal with in the last year.
"One of the things that really made this experience really difficult for us is the remarks that the mayor had made that this was drug and gang-related violence," Turner said.
The day after Hughes was shot and killed while riding in a car with her father Jeremiah Hughes, Toledo Mayor Wade Kapszukiewicz said the "drive-by style" of the shooting strongly suggested gangs were responsible.
"It’s not fair ... that a young person loses her life because of the bad decisions made by the grown-ups in her life," Kapszukiewicz said on April 28, 2022, when directly referring to the shootings of Desire and 10-year-old Damia Ezell, seeming to imply Desire's father was involved in "bad decisions."
Kapszukiewicz went on to claim that other than domestic violence, every homicide in 2022 prior to and including the death of Desire had been gang or drug-related.
Desire was shot and killed in west Toledo on April 27, 2022, when Carter fired shots at Jeremiah Hughes' car. Desire was taken to the hospital with a gunshot wound to the chest, where she later died from her injuries.
Carter claims he didn't mean to shoot Desire and meant to shoot Jeremiah Hughes, who apparently cut him off while driving.
Turner said that instead of the community giving love and support to her nephew after the tragedy of losing his daughter to an apparent road rage incident, they were in fear of him. She said the community misjudged her nephew, believing criminal activity had made him a target for the shooting.
"It had absolutely nothing to do with gangs and drugs and all of that," Turner said. "And unfortunately, it sheds a light that this can happen to any one of us any day."
WTOL 11 reached out to the mayor's office regarding Kapszukiewicz's initial comments of the shooting being gang-related after Thursday's ruling. The office said they have no comment at this time.